Life Today. Classifying Species

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In Linnaeus' time, people already talked about species.
A species is sort or kind of plant or animal, all of the same type, like 'horses' .

People also already talked about groups of animals that were similar -
like horses and donkeys and zebras. They called a group a genus.
Lots of groups aren't called 'genuses', but genera.

They didn't have any system for grouping genera together.
It was rather like having books grouped into books on 'Trains',
but no group for 'Transport' or for 'Non-fiction' or for 'Children's Books'.



Linnaeus started with species and grouped them into genera.
He then grouped genera into orders. Orders were grouped into classes
and classes were grouped into kingdoms.